


Pain management

by Pearlislove



Series: Mamma Mia oneshots [14]
Category: Mamma Mia! (Movies)
Genre: Anorexia, Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 01:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearlislove/pseuds/Pearlislove
Summary: After Donna's death, Tanya can't cope. She tries to hide it, but break a little more every day without her best friend. Can Sophie and Rosie help her find her way back from the edge, or is it already too late?





	Pain management

**Author's Note:**

> Another fanfic come to life thanks to Includeficinthesequel
> 
> This fanfic, which got a planned 3 or 4 chapters, will explore my headcanon about Tanya having an eating disorder. It will inclide flashbacks to their younger years, and the present is set shortly after Donna's death.
> 
> WARNING: Discuss eating disorders and anorexia specifically. Please do not read it if that's triggering for you.

**Chapter 1**

 

"Tanya, please just eat what Sophie is cooking. I don't want to fight you over food." Rosie sigh, tired and with new tears already threatening in her eyes. She hated fighting with her best friend.   
  
"You don't need to fight with me, I am not eating. I'm not hungry and unlike you I don't stuff myself.” Tanya maintained, leaning back against her chair. She too was tired, and she did not want to listen to Rosie badgering her about food.

 

They both knew food was Tanya's shortcoming just as much as it was Rosie's, and it was pointless to argue about it.   
  
"She doesn't have to eat something if she doesn't feel like it. She can always have something later if she get peckish before dinner. I really don't care.” Sophie offered, trying to mediate in the ongoing debate. They had been arguing abouh food since Sophie started cooking, and in her eyes it seemed very unnecessary.   
  
"See, Sophie agrees with me." Tanya said victoriously, smiling smugly at her friend.   
  
"No! Sophie doesn't understand. Sophie hasn't been traveling with you all the way from London. I have, and I know that you haven't been eating nearly enough for someone that tall." Feeling the anger bubbling in her gut, Rosie recovered some energy to argue more passionately. "You don't get to do this, Tanya! What do you think Donna would feel if she knew you were doing this? Don't you have any respect for her memory?"   
  
"Stop being so self-righteous! You're not Donna, you will never be Donna! And you're not paying her any more respect than me by acting as thought you are!" Tears flowing down her cheeks, Tanya jumped off the chair she was sitting on, standing up with her full height and then some in front of Rosie. “I hate when you think you are so much better than me!”   
  
"Maybe I wouldn't have to act like Donna if you would just listen to me! I hate when you starve yourself, Tanya, and I hate that you never listen to me and...and I wish you could just end it instead of putting me through this all over again!" Rosie finally screamed, her hands clasping over her mouth as she realized what she had said.   
  
"Aunt Rosie! How can you say that!?” Sophie asked, shocked and appalled by what she had heard. Her aunt had essentially asked her other aunt to go kill herself, and though it was obviously not meant like that it was horrible.   
  
"No, it's okay Sophie. She's right, I'm too much for her fragile little feelings." The shock in Tanya's eyes was obvious, but she just shook her head, looking like a dog trying to shake off the water on its fur. Then, she left, sweeping out the door in her five inch stilettos.   
  
Rosie buried her head in her hands. "I hate when she does this."   
  
"I..." Sophie began, then stopped. She shook her head, starting over instead. "What just happened? Those weren't nice things to say, Rosie. Tanya seemed upset." Then, even more quiet, she added. "Does she really starve herself?" It was whispered, almost curious and half-disbelieving. A piece of information extracted from the original statement that scared her.   
  
Rosie shook her head. How could she explain this to Sophie? She was just as much her and Tanya's baby as she was Donna's. And no one wanted their children to know their flaws. "Yes, Tanya does. Well, she used to anyway...and I think she's started again. Grief always hit her hard, but this..." Rosie rubbed some more at her face, trying to hide the burning tears rolling down her cheeks. "Donna's death is something else.”   
  
Sophie flinched at the mention of her mother, before quickly shiding herself for reacting in such a way. It was just a name. She couldn't breakdown every time she heard the name of her mother. "Is that why Aunt Tanya's always been so..." Sophie trailed off, flipping over the cheese sandwich in the pan.   
  
"Thin?" Rosie asked, then nodded. "Yes. She lost a lot of weight when she was young and never gained much of it back." She sigh, realizing that after what had just happened, she needed to tell Sophie the hole story. "It's always been Tanya's way of dealing with things, Sophie. Every divorce, every time someone she loved died...somehow not eating always seemed to be her default answer to pain. She started it whwn we were in collage, and it stuck."    
  
"So she got anorexia?" Sophie stated, briefly remembering the volunteers from the mainland who'd come to her class in school to teach them about mental illness. For her and the other children living in the tiny island paradise, it was hard to imagine anyone being unhappy enough to feel the way the workers described.    
  
Anorexia had come with a stack of photos they passed around. Skeletal bodies that hardly looked human anymore was showed to them as they instructed them to tell their teachers if anyone in the class was acting strange or not eating.

 

Who did you tell when your mothers best friend was the one who refused to eat?   
  
Rosie nodded. "I suppose so. As far as I know she has never been diagnosed...we're old, you know.” Rosie shrugged helplessly. “No one spoke about mental health and disorders like that back in the 70s. If you had one you suffered silently.” She admitted, a bit ashamed for her lacking  knowledge. Tanay's issues had taught her a lot over the years, but most of it was raw information deprived from first hand experience. No one had ever  _ taught  _ her what to do when your friend starved herself the way Tanya did. “Today there's a lot of things we just didn't have back then. We have always had to make sure Tanya kept functioning on our own.”   
  
  
Sophie listened, quickly turning away as she felt tears threatening to spill out of her eyes. The hot sandwiches were burning in the pan before her, and she quickly busied herself with trying  to save them. “So what do you do now?” She asked. They couldn't let Tanya continue the way she was, it was obvious enough, but a solution seemed so far away.

 

Rosie sigh.”I don't know. When I say that  _ we  _ kept her functioning, I really mean that Donna did. I've always been there and helped all I could, but she only ever really listened to Donna.” Rosie felt lost. Her best friend had died, her other best friend was heading in the same direction, and she didn't feel as though she had any way of helping.

 

Rosie's words stung for Sophie, burning even more painfully in her heart than her mother's name. Things had been hopeless since the day her mother died, and what Rosie was telling her about her aunt did not make it any better. If anything, it made Sophie worry more, her heart breaking down into tiny fragments as she felt for her beloved aunt.  “I'll talk to her” She decided suddenly, fed up with bouncing statements back and forth between herself and Rosie, never getting anywhere. 

 

“You're going to talk to Tanya?” Rosie asked, surprised to hear Sophie taking on the monumental task. “Sophie, you don't have to! I can go, try to get her to eat something and…”

 

“And what?!” Sophie snapped, her irritation rising as her heart plummeted at the thought of what she had signed up to do. “She doesn't want to talk to you! You made her run away from here! It's better if I try.” Sophie said, taking a deep breath and trying her best to seem nicer. It wasn't fair to blame anything on Rosie, it really wasn't her fault. “Please just give me a shot. Odds are Aunt Tanya will listen more to me than you right now.”

 

“You're right.” Rosie agreed, watching with a sad frown as Sophie walked out of the room with a plate of burnt cheese toast. “And I’m sorry.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you liked it! <3


End file.
